From people of varying ability and employing people from the LGBTQ community to those with different educational and vocational backgrounds, India Inc. trying to ensure that its workforce is in line with its consumers.
Thirty-year-old Nikhita Bandi is a market manager for shoppers with major Marico FMCG. She is always on her toes, traveling from one city to another to understand the shopping behavior of consumers at modern retail stores such as Reliance Retail, DMart and Spencer Retail. The confidence and commitment of the 2017 IIM-Bangalore alumnus is remarkable for his job. Talking passionately about Marico’s digital transformation journey and how she took advantage of it on a virtual call, no one knows that she’s operating with one hand. “I’m grateful to Marico for making sure my disability doesn’t turn out best for me,” she says.

While Bandi is a role model for people with disabilities, for Marico, her passion for work is a testament to her conscious strategy to employ talent from different walks of life and ensure that her workforce is as diverse as possible. “It simply came to our notice then. To make the right calls for innovation, it’s important to have the same social representation in the organization as we have in society, ”says Amit Prakash, CHRO, Marico.

Today it is a gender diverse workforce. But now, companies, especially the big ones, are pushing the needle of diversity further by trying not only to employ women but also people with different skills and industry experiences, rather than people with different disabilities and people from communities LGBTQ. “We are launching Kindle and Audible for the visually and hearing impaired. How can we do that if our teams do not have visually and hearing impaired people who can give us the right input? ” says Deepti Varma, director, HR, Amazon India